The starting point for Kara Rooney’s exhibition Run from the Shadows at HIT Gallery is a quotation from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular-Plural: “The horizon of the infinite is no longer the horizon of the whole, but the “whole” (all that is) as put on hold everywhere, pushed to the outside just as much as it is pushed back inside the “self.” It is no longer a line that is drawn, or a line that will be drawn, which orients or gathers the meaning of a course of progress or navigation. It is the opening [la brèche] or distancing [l’écartement] of horizon itself, and in the opening: us. We happen as the opening itself, the dangerous fault line of a rupture.” Rooney’s recent activities, particularly her solo exhibition In Apogee, which premiered at the Prague-based gallery Berlinskej Model this past December, predetermined this exhibition's conceptual base. The title, in many ways, is typical of the range of topics that constitute the artist’s research: in astronomical terms, if an object is ‘in apogee’ it means that it is at the outermost point of its orbit. By contrast, the term also describes the highest point in the development of something; a climax or culmination. Marginal points between worlds, bodies and cultures, or the apogee of language (its untranslatability) are what Rooney explores in her work.

She examines dialectical models of contradiction and attraction, present in the translation of languages, ideas, in the migration of individuals, and the administration of temporary political and cultural boundaries with the help of sculptures and photographic works, with which she aims to create strictly site-specific installations, including video, sound and performance. This creates an interactive environment of relief assemblages that openly evoke the interpretive nature of poetry. Like so, she emphasizes the relation and connection of memory and social interaction. Utilizing the methodologies of performance and collaboration, often involving the human body of dancers and her own, Rooney creates a sort of physical meditation on how we create and simultaneously destroy our competing modes of thinking and their residual structures – this dialectical and opposing relationship between rational and emotional perception, between language and gesture. Jacques Ranciere deals with the question of whether anyone can own and redirect the power invested in language, which according to him, implies a modification in the relationship between its circulation and social distribution of bodies, an idea that does not take place on the basis of simple monetary exchange. The dominant emphasis of the exhibition is on the reflection of the body as a critical platform, an instrument of defiance, protest or revolution. Referring again to Ranciere, in Rooney’s perception, the aesthetic of the object is a constituting element of its politics. The politics of embodiment, as Marcela A. Fuentes sees it in her text "Performance, Politics, and Protest," refers to the ability of the viewer to perceive the different concepts of corporeality: from the practices and regulations that shape racial formation to normative scripts, structuring the everyday performance of gender and sexuality. Similarly, in Run from the Shadows, the relationship between performance and politics provides for a wide range of behaviors and entities, all of which link the individual body to a larger, collective body of protest.

Beyond the Western discourse on the politics of the body, Rooney also looks to the functionality of ritual and cultural tradition for inspiration. reVerb No. 4 was inspired by the artist's witnessing of Egyptian Zar, a traditional form of folk music that combines tambourines, drum and song, along with belts composed of organic materials--shells, goat hooves and other ephemera--as a means of sonically exorcising psychological repression. The performance, captured on video, replicates this ritual gesture albeit with a wearable object fashioned by the artist's own hand. The resulting action establishes an allegorical parallel between the folk tradition and sound's ability to extend the agency of "the political body" beyond the limits of the performative act itself, in our case beyond limits of the exhibition, institutions, art. As the repetitive movement breaks and fractures the sculptural form, so too are we freed from the potentially oppressive constraints of belief and social indoctrination.